


gnat

by MissSpookyEyes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Child Abuse, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, OC backstory, Violence, a child was very much harmed in this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 03:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30099828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissSpookyEyes/pseuds/MissSpookyEyes
Summary: It was nonsense, Vullen knew that at once. It had to be a lie. It was certainly possible for an untrained Force user to kill, but anybody powerful enough to do so would have stood out like a beacon in the Dark Side, one even he would have felt from the moment he set foot on the planet.If the alien child could have done what she suggested, she should have flamed in his sight. She did not. But there was still something about her ... something just on the edge of perception. It was as if he could not quite bring her into focus; as if, no matter how he narrowed his eyes and squinted to see her clearly, something about her slipped away.Miralukans, he knew, were able to 'see' through the Force without necessarily being Force-sensitives. Perhaps that was what he sensed.It had to be a lie. But it was the only lead he had.A low-ranking Sith is sent to a hellish mining colony to investigate a spate of unexplained deaths. What he finds would be condemned as an aberration by the purebloods who dominate the Sith. But times are changing ...(The story of how future Sith Inquisitor An'nath was discovered by the Sith.)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	1. Not Much of a Sith

It was as hot as the perpetual summer on Korriban's blasted surface inside the elevator, and it was getting hotter.

Vullen surreptitiously used the sleeve of his robe to mop some of the sweat from his brow, then glanced across at the foreman, who was staring straight ahead, pretending not to notice. Sith weren't supposed to sweat.

_But then, you're not much of a Sith, are you, Vullen?_

Despite the heat of the elevator, he felt his face grow even hotter as the remembered words rung in his ears; the parting remark of Darth Crucis, accompanied by a careless gesture of dismissal, with which he'd been sent on this mission. Vullen had long ago grown resigned to not being much of a Sith - 'living proof that the adage that only the strongest make it off Korriban alive is a fallacy', as Crucis had once described him - and since being Sith cut you off from being anything else, that made Vullen not much of anything. But coming from Crucis - or Torslan, as he had been known back in the days when they were acolytes together - the words would never lose their sting.

Vullen thought of Crucis as a friend, because a world in which Crucis was not his friend was a terrifying one.

Someone like him, too Force-sensitive to be ignored and yet unable to attain more than a rudimentary grasp of most of the Sith arts, should never have made it off Korriban alive. It was down to Torslan - Crucis - that he had. Everything that Vullen struggled hopelessly to perform, Torslan grasped with ease, gliding through the lightsaber forms as effortlessly as the rocks he lifted sailed overhead. The pureblood shouldn't even have deigned to dirty his blade with Vullen's internal organs; it would have been left to one of the weaker acolytes, jostling desperately for a position in the middle of the pack, to eliminate him as they all battled for the chance to become full Sith.

Fortunately for Vullen, his mother was a prominent executive at one of the Empire's bigger pharmaceutical corporations, and she was devoted to the cause of her son's survival. She had spent much of her fortune arranging for certain substances to be smuggled to Vullen on Korriban, and Torslan had been quick to grasp the possibilities. Even at the Sith Academy, the death of another acolyte by violence attracted some sort of investigation, but poisoning had such a pleasant plausible deniability about it. In exchange for free use of Vullen's stash of chemicals, Torslan had ensured Vullen's survival. Even now that Torslan was Darth Crucis, a rising star of the Sphere of Technology, he hadn't forgotten Vullen, and could always be relied upon to contact his old friend, should there be a certain kind of work to be done.

 _A task that shouldn't tax even your capabilities,_ Crucis had called it.

'Tell me again,' Vullen said now, breaking the silence in the thick, hot air of the elevator, 'how many men have died in the past three months.'

'Seventeen, lord.'

'And what is your usual rate of attrition when it comes to manpower?'

Vullen wasn't looking at the foreman, but he heard the unmistakable sound of someone trying to swallow without enough saliva. 'We average three deaths a month, lord. Unless there's a big cave-in, or an epidemic among the workers.'

'Has there been a cave-in or an epidemic in the past three months?'

'No, lord.'

Vullen knew that he didn't cut a particularly intimidating figure, with his Sith robes failing to conceal his ever-increasing girth and his plump face shining with sweat; he knew he looked more like a prosperous merchant than a feared agent of the Dark Council. Still, the fear was rolling off the foreman in waves. A Sith was a Sith, after all, and the foreman - what was his name? Meckley, that was it - knew how little room for manoeuvre there was in his agreement with the Empire. As long as the foreman kept the ebonium ore flowing, he had free reign on this infernal planet. But if that flow was interrupted - as it had been by the recent spate of deaths - then there was nowhere else for the blame to land.

Some Sith would have executed Meckley in front of his workers, promoted one of them to foreman in his place, and left without ever getting the hem of their robes dusty. But Crucis needed this problem to actually be solved, needed the ore to flow uninterrupted into the maw of his labs and testing centres. And failure was no more an option for Vullen than it was for the foreman. 

Or rather, it carried the same penalty.

Vullen couldn't sense any guilt from Meckley, though - beyond the bedrock level of basic guilt that anyone emitted in the presence of a Sith, that was. It was possible that it was there and Vullen just wasn't sensing it, but it had never made any sense for the foreman to be involved in the deaths of his men. Nobody went into ebonium mining because they expected to live long - nobody went into ebonium mining if they had any other choice - but the work was dangerous and difficult enough without Meckley murdering his own miners.

The elevator finally juddered to a halt with a lengthy shriek of tortured metal, and Vullen's anxiety jumped another notch. He was not particularly claustrophobic and caves had never frightened him much, but being five hundred feet beneath the planet's surface with the only route back to the surface a return trip in this dilapidated industrial elevator was nobody's idea of a good time.

Meckley stepped forward with a muttered apology, and began twisting the crank that would open the doors. There was another long, rusty protest from the mechanism, and the elevator doors slowly pulled apart, inch by unwilling inch.

Vullen stepped out of the elevator, drawing a deep breath - and immediately wished he hadn't.

As hot and airless as it had been inside the elevator, it was even worse down here. The air was scorching and foul-smelling, partly from the gases that seeped up from the planet's core through each tunnel they opened, but mainly from the stink emitted by the fifty or so humanoids who occupied the cavern.

Vullen had somehow imagined solitude, loneliness, down here in the dark, but the cavern boiled with people, too many of them, sweating and jostling each other like maggots breeding in a wound. Miners had been digging, ever deeper, for ebonium on this planet for centuries, and nobody was going to waste time hollowing out living space for those miners, even now that the diggings were far too deep for it to be an efficient use of energy to send anything besides ore up in the elevator. As a result, a cavern no more than thirty feet across at its widest point was being used as both a base of operations for mining and as living space - not that anything that could be done down here could really be called living.

A whistle sounded, oddly muffled as if the air choked noise along with everybody who breathed it, and the labourers left off what they were doing, scurrying to form ragged lines as if preparing for inspection. With the people clustered in the centre of the cavern, Vullen had a clearer view of the rest of it. The black mouths of tunnels yawned from the walls, surrounded by pulleys, chains and other machinery; two super-drills, easily recognisable from the cones that protruded from their bases, stood up against a wall, as smeared with grime as everything else. A line of carts, some filled already with ore, others waiting, stood near the elevator. There were no shelters, no tents, no furniture beyond what could be fashioned from crates; it would be too hot to sleep with a blanket, but he could see where the miners had laid out little spaces for themselves, demarcated by tools and pitiful little heaps of belongings. The air-circulation units kept the oxygen level and the temperature at levels which were just about liveable for most humanoids, but the rank smell of so many living in such a small space was so rancid, so potent it almost made Vullen gag.

And from this cavern, the miners probed their way deeper and deeper into the planet, hewing tunnels painfully into the rock, never knowing when a careless strike from a pickaxe might cause a cave-in or, worse, release a pocket of toxic gas. Or even ignite it; there had been explosions in the past which had killed as many as a dozen men at a time as deadly balls of burning air travelled along the passageways. 

Constant threat of death. No light. No air. Barely any water. And no escape. The elevators were only authorised to carry humanoid personnel to the surface once a month, allowing the sick or injured - or more frequently, the dead - to be exchanged for fresh bodies.

Three men a month? Vullen found it hard to imagine humanoids surviving in this hell for three days. No wonder the Empire's hunger for slaves and indentured labourers was almost as insatiable as its need for the ore they dug.

He surveyed the miners drawn up in ragged lines in front of him. Many of them were human, he knew, but in the sickly light of the lamps, they all looked like filthy animals. He had thought Meckley's appearance horribly ragged when the foreman met him off his shuttle; now he realised that the man had actually dressed up for the occasion, compared to the threadbare garments of the labourers. What skin was visible beneath the thick crust of sweat and black dust bore livid red sores and wounds; many had rivulets of dried blood running from their nostrils or the corner of their eyes.

For a moment, Vullen thought he was hearing things - some kind of distant grating of rocks and metal, a rushing or sighing of the wind that never blew down here - and then he realised what he was hearing: Fifty pairs of lungs struggling and heaving to filter air through dust so thick and so abrasive they would bleed internally with every breath.

No wonder so many were dying. They should be ripping each other apart like animals down here. And yet ...

'Remind me how they died.'

Meckley was beside him. 'Uh - we don't know?' He cast a frightened glance at Vullen and hurried on. 'That is, we know - we think we know that three of them were struck on the head by rocks.'

'Falling rocks?'

'No, lord - hit on the head by someone else. The men they were working with. They all confessed, but they said they didn't remember doing it. It was like someone controlled them, they said.'

Vullen nodded. He had already been given this information, and he knew that all three men had been taken up to the surface and executed weeks ago. At least they had got to see the sky again before they died - but there was now no chance of excavating their memories of the murders, of figuring out whether they had indeed been somehow controlled or possessed. Of course, if that had been a real possibility, Crucis would have come himself, or at least sent someone a lot more skilled than Vullen.

One of the nearest miners mumbled something.

'Speak up, man,' Vullen ordered.

'I said there's something down here with us.' The man's eyes were blue, an incongruous sight amidst the grime and blood that smeared the rest of his face. 'Something that shouldn't be here.'

'It whispers in the dark,' another man volunteered, the rest of the miners nodding in agreement. 'It gets to you in your dreams.'

'You can almost see it, but not quite.'

'It only shows itself when it's marked you for death.'

Any other place and time, and Vullen would have dealt summarily with this kind of superstitious, deranged nonsense. But down here in the dark and the heat, breathing the foul air pumped out hoarse and stinking from the air-circulation machines ... 

Besides, seventeen men were dead.

Vullen, like any graduate of the Sith Academy, knew very well that there were things that lurked in dark tunnels which could drive men to madness and murder. But this wasn't Korriban, nor any stronghold of the ancient Sith; there had never been life on this planet until the Empire arrived to mine. None could thrive.

'How did the others die?' he asked. He had all this information already, but there was a benefit to making Meckley tell him out loud in front of all his miners, ramping up the pressure on a guilty conscience. If the culprit was among the labourers. 'The other fourteen.'

There was another ripple of muttering from the miners; Meckley spoke loud and fast to drown it out. 'We don't exactly know, lord. They just -'

'Dropped,' one of the men put in, and the others nodded, eyes glittering in their grimy faces.

'Right in front of our eyes.'

'One second upright, the next a corpse.'

Meckley snarled at the miners to silence them, then turned back to Vullen. 'There was a doctor here two weeks ago, sent by Lord Crucis. He examined the freshest bodies. He said they had brain haemorrhages but he didn't know why.'

What the doctor had actually said was _interruption to the blood flow to the autonomic regions of the brain._ But it was true that he hadn't known why. Nor had the scientist who accompanied him been able to pinpoint any environmental causes. Yes, the conditions down here were hellish, but if they killed a man, they did so in months or weeks. Not seconds.

Vullen had studied the autopsies, at least what he could make sense of, and then gone over them again with the doctor, trying to understand. The best explanation that the medical expert had been able to offer was that the artery which supplied all the blood to the autonomic regions of the brain - the part that kept hearts beating and blood flowing and nerves travelling up and down spines - had somehow been blocked or pinched closed for a couple of seconds. Interruption to the blood supply to those parts of the brain; instant death. 

What nobody had been able to explain was how that could happen without external trauma, or any sign of damage to the artery at all. In each man, the blood had flowed, and then it just … stopped. 

'And there are no other people on the planet?' he asked Meckley, dragging his attention back to the present. 'No other life forms at all?'

Meckley shook his head. 'No, lord.'

Vullen pointed to his left. 'Then what are they?'

Meckley turned in the direction indicated by Vullen, to see two small figures huddling in the shadow of one of the mine carts. They shrank back from Vullen's pointing finger and Meckley's gaze, so that it was hard to make them out; their bodies seemed curiously shrunken, and were those bandages wrapped around their heads?

'Oh, them? The eyeless brats?'

Vullen recoiled. 'Children? You have children down here?'

'Just aliens,' Meckley said, looking slightly puzzled. 'When we're opening up new seams and galleries, we - we need to know if it's safe on the other side, see? If it's safe for the men to breathe? The gnats, they can squeeze through the smallest spaces. So we send them through first.'

Vullen felt dizzy; it seemed to get hotter down here by the second, and the foul-smelling air seemed devoid of oxygen. 'Gnats?' he repeated absently, staring at the shrunken figures.

'Just what the men call them. They whine and whine, see?'

'Until you squash them,' a voice called out from the back of the miners' lines, and there was a rumble of what might have been - in a fresher air, under a kind of sky, on a different world - laughter.

Vullen ignored Meckley's sheepish grin, still transfixed by the diminutive shapes almost swallowed by the gloom. It was an old idea, as old as miners, as old as humans; sending in small animals, tiny birds in cages, to see if the air was safe to breathe. But there were devices now, technology to do this job ...

 _Children are cheaper,_ drawled Crucis's voice in his ear.

'Bring them out here,' Vullen ordered, praying his voice didn't shake. 'All of them.'

Meckley shrugged and gestured to one of the miners, who blew a whistle hanging round his neck. Two notes this time.

In a halting fashion, as if they feared what was going to happen to them if they left their hiding places but also feared the consequences of disobedience, the two children Vullen had seen before stepped out from behind the mine cart. Two more appeared from behind one of the drills, and another, which Vullen had taken to be a mere crumpled piece of cloth, unfolded itself. Contracting into a tight knot, they drifted across the cavern towards Vullen, Meckley and the miners.

They made almost no noise as they moved, which contributed to their eerie appearance. As they drew closer, Vullen saw that their feet were either bare or wrapped in rags, and that they were one and all so thin - emaciated even - that he didn't think their footfalls could have sounded above a whisper if they tried. It was impossible to tell their sex or even make out much of their features, but Vullen estimated them at around eight or nine years old, perhaps the tallest as old as ten. And all of them, whatever rags they wore, whatever blood or sores were visible elsewhere on their grimy, stick-thin limbs, had cloth wrapped around their heads, covering their eyes.

Or rather, where their eyes should have been.

 _Miralukans._ Vullen controlled the instinctive shudder of repulsion at the very thought of what was underneath those blindfolds.

'How did they come to be here?' he asked.

Meckley shrugged. 'It was before my time, lord. The way I heard it from Welck - he was foreman before me - a ship of the fleet took a refugee transport, back around the time Coruscant was sacked. Someone thought the little grubs would be good for mining work. They don't need light to see, see?'

Vullen nodded. It made sense. It was sensible. This was the proper place for the eyeless, yes, grubs, blind and groping in the dark.

And yet ... He tried not to notice the ribs clearly visible through the pallid skin, the livid bruises. He had wondered why the miners didn't tear each other apart like animals down here. He should have realised it could only be because they had something else to rip into.

Around the time of the Sacking of Coruscant ... They must be considerably older than they looked. 'Six years, they've been here?'

'Give or take. There were around twenty at first, I'm told.'

Vullen was horrified to find himself almost impressed at the tenacity it must have taken for any of the little slaves to cling on to life in such conditions. He had to assert his will on this situation, get a grip on Meckley and the others; he was here to solve a problem.

But if the children - the aliens were sent in first, wriggling deeper into the planet than any of the miners, they might know something. He stepped closer to them.

'I am here to investigate the deaths in this mine over the past months,' he intoned, striving to balance authority and approachability. 'If you know how any of the miners came to die in the tunnels, you must tell me now.'

He was prepared for them to look blankly at him, to shake their heads, or to fail to acknowledge his words completely.

He was not prepared for one of them to step forward, look up at him and ask: 'Are you a Sith?'

'What?'

'Are you a Sith?' the thing repeated, turning its blindfolded face up to his.

Vullen drew himself up. 'I am a Dark Lord of the Sith, here on the authority of Darth Crucis himself. If you have information -'

'I know what happened to those men.' She - he thought it was a female now - spoke in a high-pitched yet oddly harsh voice; years in the tunnels must have roughened her lungs. But there was no hint of fear in her voice, nor in what he could see of her face below the ragged blindfold.

Meckley scoffed beside him; Vullen raised a hand to silence him. 'Then you must tell me.'

It was odd, he could not see anything of her eyes beneath the blindfold, two torn patches of cloth held in place by a band, all of it twisted together with what looked like wire. But he could feel them, somehow, could feel them on his face. They burned. 'Show me first.'

'Show you?' Vullen frowned. 'Show you - show you my power?'

She nodded.

'Insolent -' Meckley started forward, hand raised; the child took a step backward, but she did not flinch.

Vullen raised his own hand, which was enough to stop the foreman in his tracks, but did not look away from the child's face. He could still feel those burning eyes.

The back of his neck itched.

Usually, he was wary of displaying any of his so-called Sith powers. The bureaucrats and merchants he generally dealt with on his indolent, backwater world had never demanded that he do so; he had the title and the robes and could do a half-decent impression of the manner, and any doubters knew that he had the backing of Darth Crucis, and that was more than enough. He tried to give the impression that intervening in their petty affairs would be beneath his dignity, and that worked for everybody; Ceridu preferred a lazy Sith to the alternative. The real reason, of course, was that he didn't want anyone to see him struggle.

For some reason, though, he felt inclined to grant the child's request. What was the harm? Let her glimpse power for once. It was not as if she would know the difference between someone like Vullen and someone like Crucis.

Vullen drew a deep breath and stretched out his hand. Without taking his eyes off the child, he focused his mind on a lump of ore perhaps twice the size of his head which lay atop a heap nearby.

_Peace is a lie; there is only passion._

His peaceful life on Ceridu was the lie, the pleasant lie in which he wallowed. Sweating in this infernal cavern, choking on the air rank with acrid fear and the smells of excrement, doing Crucis's bidding in places the Darth would never deign to tread - this was his truth. 

The ore wobbled. 

Crucis had always said he lacked passion, even back in the days when he was Torslan and Vullen was less than nothing. He could see Torslan the acolyte standing over him now, arms crossed over lithe chest, red skin kindled to flame by the surly Korriban sunrise while Vullen fought to throw off the chains of another sweaty, fitful night. _You don't even crave pleasure, Vullen. Just comfort._

The familiar shame writhed in his belly, but beneath it ... Beneath it, hate yawned acidly.

_Through passion, I gain strength._

The heavy lump of ore rose slowly into the air. 

Glad that the heat provided him with an excuse for the sweat pouring off his brow in rivulets, Vullen gritted his teeth and coaxed the ore over towards the gathered men in a slow, ungainly arc. It moved in fits, jerkily, listing from side to side, as he grappled to find the elusive balance between himself and the Force, straining to tap into the power but battling to keep from clutching too hard, from letting the ore slip through his fingers like soap from between wet hands ...

He would need to bathe for days to get the stink and filth of this miserable place off his skin. 

He could bathe for days, once he got this sorry business over with. 

_Through strength, I gain -_

____He fumbled, clutched, lost his grip. The ore plummeted to the rocky floor and shattered, spilling its glimmering black insides over the ground between himself and the child._ _ _ _

____It had looked rather dramatic, actually. No reason for anybody to think he hadn't done it on purpose._ _ _ _

____'Now,' he said into the silence, trying to keep the breathlessness out of his tone. 'Information.'_ _ _ _

____The child looked down at the ore, and then back up at Vullen, as if trying to decide whether or not that had been impressive enough for her purposes. Then she shrugged slightly and said: 'I killed them.'_ _ _ _

____'You - what?'_ _ _ _

____'I killed them.'_ _ _ _

____'You lying little -' Meckley raised his fist again, lunging forward, but once again Vullen's upraised hand forestalled him. Balked, the foreman swung round on him. 'My lord, forgive this waste of your time -'_ _ _ _

____'Silence.' Vullen had not once looked away from the child, nor had she looked away from him._ _ _ _

____It was nonsense, Vullen knew that at once. It had to be a lie. It was certainly possible for an untrained Force user to kill, but anybody powerful enough to do so would have stood out like a beacon in the Dark Side, one even he would have felt from the moment he set foot on the planet._ _ _ _

____If the alien child could have done what she suggested, she should have flamed in his sight. She did not. But there was still something about her ... something just on the edge of perception. It was as if he could not quite bring her into focus; as if, no matter how he narrowed his eyes and squinted to see her clearly, something about her slipped away._ _ _ _

____Miralukans, he knew, were able to 'see' through the Force without necessarily being Force-sensitives. Perhaps that was what he sensed._ _ _ _

____It had to be a lie. But it was the only lead he had._ _ _ _

____'You hit them over the head with rocks?' he asked, allowing his tone to drip with scepticism._ _ _ _

____'I made their friends hit them. But only at first.'_ _ _ _

____'How could you make their friends hit them?'_ _ _ _

____'I can make people do things.'_ _ _ _

____Vullen raised his eyebrows. 'Show me.'_ _ _ _

____He would have expected bluster, or a show of fear. Instead, the blindfolded head turned this way and that, as if she was looking at all the assembled miners. Eventually she said, 'I can only do it if they're distracted. But they're looking at me.'_ _ _ _

____They were that; Vullen could feel the disbelief, the unease, the anger, a queasy mixture roiling in the thick air._ _ _ _

____'At first I just killed the worst ones,' she went on. 'But then I heard him -' she pointed at Meckley, and Vullen saw with a surge of revulsion that her finger was missing a nail, the tip ragged and bloody - 'say that if men kept dying, they would send a Sith to come and investigate. And I remembered what the Sith do. They come, and they take you away to Korriban.' She said the words as if it was something learned by rote but half-remembered, perhaps dredged up from her early childhood before the Empire took the refugee ship._ _ _ _

____Perhaps her parents had told her that if she was bad, the Sith would come and take her away, Vullen thought, half-hypnotised by the utter assurance with which she was telling her tale. 'How did you kill the others?'_ _ _ _

____She hesitated, but not as if she was stumped by the question, more as if she was trying to decide how best to explain something very obvious to someone very stupid. Then she said: 'I looked inside, and I found the right place, and I touched them.'_ _ _ _

____In his mind’s eye, Vullen had a sudden, vivid image of an artery pinched closed._ _ _ _

____But he had never heard of anybody killing that way. There was a reason that the Sith closed fists of Dark Side-fury around throats, or used the Force to toss bodies across rooms or off cliffs. To reach inside someone's body, to pick out something miniscule yet physical, and manipulate it … Nobody untrained had that kind of fine control. Nobody. And nobody could see inside another person like that._ _ _ _

____But she was Miralukan, and he had heard that Miralukan made fine Jedi ... And those men had died ..._ _ _ _

____He opened his mouth, and realised his throat was too dry to speak; he had to force himself to swallow several times before he said, 'Show me.'_ _ _ _

____Her head turned slightly, the blindfolded gaze travelling from him to Meckley. She began to smile._ _ _ _

____'No,' Vullen interrupted. 'Not him.'_ _ _ _

____She pouted slightly, and turned in the other direction, looking past Vullen and the spellbound foreman to the lines of miners._ _ _ _

____They drew back, looking apprehensive, as the child's head slowly turned, surveying the lines. A part of Vullen thought how ridiculous this was, a crowd of grown men shrinking in fear from a starving little girl._ _ _ _

____But the rest of him was caught up in the spell, and he watched with bated breath as the girl's head stopped, her blind gaze fixing on a man in the back row._ _ _ _

____The miners on either side parted as she took a step forward,_ _ _ _

____The man she had singled out was braced on his back foot, a ghastly grin stretching his features as his eyes flicked from side to side, clearly not wanting to show fear in the face of a small child's outlandish threat but feeling wary and isolated all the same._ _ _ _

____The Miralukan girl's face, or what he could see of it beneath the blindfold and the grime, showed nothing. Slowly, she raised her hand from her side so that it was pointing at the man, fingers pressed together, thumb poised as if ready to grab at something._ _ _ _

____Vullen reached out with the Force for any sense of the girl, any intimation that she was doing something, but he felt nothing. But then, what did it take to pinch an artery? Not much power, perhaps. But control ..._ _ _ _

____Although the cavern was filled with the sound of labouring lungs, it seemed that all he could hear was the condemned man's quick, harsh breathing. And still Vullen felt nothing from the child._ _ _ _

____Then, without warning, she twisted her wrist so that her palm faced upwards, and Vullen saw her thumb press against her gathered fingertips._ _ _ _

____He felt the faintest stir in the Force, like a single strand of spider-silk brushing against his face._ _ _ _

____And without a sound, the miner collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut._ _ _ _

____The silence was broken with several cries of rage and alarm. The miners stepped back from the fallen man, jostling to get away from him but without going near the child. Meckley brushed past Vullen, swearing, and went to one knee beside the felled miner, bending to check for a pulse although Vullen could tell that he knew it was useless. The man had died in an instant, between one heartbeat and the next. Although his last moments had been filled with fear and confusion, the death itself had been merciful enough in its way._ _ _ _

____Somehow he was sure that was not a consideration the child cared much for._ _ _ _

____She hadn't moved, except to turn her blindfolded gaze up to Vullen's face again, as if waiting for his reaction._ _ _ _

____Vullen realised that he was breathing fast, almost panting. Absentmindedly, he mopped the sweat from his brow, registering the scrape of gritty dust on his skin as his mind raced._ _ _ _

____Power. It was real, there, contained in the child standing quietly in front of him; not power as he knew it, but undeniable and deadly._ _ _ _

____Power the Sith must have. There were still those who would have cut her down without a word rather than allow her to pollute the halls of the Academy. But times were changing. The call had gone out, urgent, winging its way from Dromund Kaas to every planet, station, outpost and ship in the Empire: Find Force-sensitives. Find those who have the potential to swell the ranks of the Sith, and you will be rewarded._ _ _ _

____This Miralukan slave-child didn't have the usual kind of potential they looked for. He doubted she could lift anything much heavier than a feather or raise so much as a spark of lightning on the end of one finger. But what she did have was precision, of a kind he had never dreamed of. Somehow, she could not just see inside bodies - brains - but was able to spin and direct the Force into the narrowest of needles, thinner and sharper than a thought._ _ _ _

____Not just a new potential Sith. A new kind of Sith._ _ _ _

_They come and they take you away to Korriban ..._

____For the briefest second, he considered doing it himself. Putting the child on his shuttle and heading straight to Dromund Kaas and the Sith Enclave._ _ _ _

____But the vision faded before it took shape. He knew he needed Crucis. Despite the new edict opening up the Academy to aliens, half the Sith - maybe more than half - would rather quietly murder a prospective acolyte from one of the lesser races. Especially one who didn't present the usual forms of power. If he took the child, she would probably be killed before he got the chance to demonstrate what she could do, and himself along with her for presumption, more than likely._ _ _ _

____Crucis had the power. Crucis had the clout. Crucis would also get the credit - but he would owe Vullen, too._ _ _ _

____'You will come with me.'_ _ _ _

____The blind face tilted. 'To Korriban?'_ _ _ _

For a second, he forgot himself and asked in disbelief, 'You _want_ to go to Korriban?' 

____She raised one thin shoulder in a kind of half-shrug._ _ _ _

____Vullen recollected himself. Of course she wanted to go. She didn't know what it was like there._ _ _ _

____And with what he had seen of what it was like here ..._ _ _ _

____There was a splutter behind him; Meckley, still kneeling beside the body, had twisted to point an accusing finger at the child. 'She - she - little alien witch killed seventeen men!'_ _ _ _

____'Eighteen,' Vullen corrected coldly. It was only after he'd done it that he realised he had stepped in front of the girl, interposing his bulk between her and the outraged foreman. 'And now that she is leaving with me, I expect ore production to return to its former levels and remain there. Or Darth Crucis will be most displeased.'_ _ _ _

____It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to gather her things and say her goodbyes when he came to his senses; what things could she have to gather? As for goodbyes, he supposed it was possible she could want to say them to the other Miralukan children - but he couldn't help but notice that they didn't seem to want to stand anywhere near her, any more than the miners did._ _ _ _

____'Are you ready to go, child?'_ _ _ _

____She held up one dirty finger._ _ _ _

____Vullen frowned. 'You want to - one thing - oh.' He felt a slight chill in his blood, despite the hellish temperature down here. He glanced from the small face with its ragged blindfold to Meckley; foremen were replaceable. Children so strong in the Force were not._ _ _ _

____Besides, he wanted another look at what she did._ _ _ _

____He nodded._ _ _ _

____'Lord?' Meckley had got to his feet now. The men on either side of him were shrinking away, leaving him stranded in a widening circle. 'My lord?'_ _ _ _

____Vullen realised that he himself had stepped away from the child, who stood clear of his bulk, her small figure revealed._ _ _ _

____'My lord, you can't ... You can't let her ...' Meckley's voice was shaking; Vullen could see his knees trembling. He took a tentative step towards the child, as if contemplating rushing her, but looked between her and Vullen and stopped, moaning in despair._ _ _ _

____The child raised her hand._ _ _ _

____Vullen reached out with the Force, straining to get a sense of what she was doing. There was something, like the ghost of movement in the air ..._ _ _ _

____'I've s-served well, m-my lord,' Meckley whispered. 'I've served f-faithfully ...'_ _ _ _

____There it was, the sticky whisper of the web-strand against his face, just for a second, but more than one this time, as if the web itself clung damply to his skin._ _ _ _

____Again, the child rotated her wrist, her thumb pressing against her fingers._ _ _ _

____The children were all so thin, it barely made a sound when they hit the rocks._ _ _ _

____Vullen whirled, robes clinging damply to his legs, to see the other Miralukans unmoving on the ground._ _ _ _

____He looked back at Meckley’s stricken, disbelieving face, and then at the unreadable one the child turned up to him._ _ _ _

____He should not hope that it had been mercy. Not when he knew what Korriban was like._ _ _ _

____But he did._ _ _ _


	2. Failures and Weaklings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Low-ranking Sith Vullen brings his new discovery to Darth Crucis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See previous chapter for notes.

‘Could you not,’ Darth Crucis asked, wrinkling his nose with aristocratic distaste, ‘have had it washed?’

‘I thought it best to bring her straight to you,’ Vullen muttered, not meeting Crucis’s eyes. 

The Sith Lord had a point. The stench down in the mines had been overwhelming, but its very pervasiveness had made it somehow easier to ignore. In the recycled air of first the shuttle and now the Brenko space station, the indescribably filthy stink of the child soiled the air around her, making it almost physically difficult to force oneself close to her. Vullen honestly hadn’t been able to face the thought of trying to bathe the girl. Even sitting within arm’s length of her on the polished wood chairs in front of Crucis’s desk was difficult enough.

It wasn’t just the smell. The dirty, ragged blindfold that covered half her eyeless face, the emaciated limbs that poked out of rents in her soiled smock, the eerie silence with which she moved, all of it seemed much more horrifying out of that nightmarish cavern than it had in it. She had suited her environment then, but in the rich, imposing surroundings of Crucis’s office, the sheer wrongness of her tore at the senses.

Only the child herself seemed unaware of how out of place she was. Crucis’s chambers on the Brenko station, the seat from which he oversaw research, mining and manufacturing operations across three sectors, avoided the traps of showy extravagance many Sith fell into in an effort to display their wealth and influence, but it was none the less redolent of power for all that. There was no furniture apart from the massive desk, hewn from Kaasian granite, and the sleek chairs of polished wood; the expanse of oxblood carpet thus revealed had the unmistakable depth of authentic Dubrillion wool. The subtle lighting, without doing anything as showy as spotlighting Crucis’s desk, made it impossible to look anywhere else; the only other things highlighted in the room were the few sculptures and objets d’art which stood, each in their own pool of light and on its own plinth or shelf, against the walls.

Vullen realised he had no idea how much of this the child could perceive - how did Miralukan ‘vision’ even work? - but she certainly gave no indication of being impressed or intimidated by the Sith Lord’s chambers. She simply sat, her face devoid of expression, just as she had on the shuttle Vullen had commandeered to bring them here. When he had falteringly attempted to reassure her or make conversation, she had simply ignored him, just as she had his warnings not to make herself sick when food was placed in front of her, gorging herself instead, only to vomit much of what she had eaten down the front of her smock a few minutes later, indifferent to embarrassment or Vullen’s ineffectual attempts to clean her up.

The vomit, now dried, was still splattering her front as she sat in front of Crucis, blind face turned incuriously to the Sith Lord, apparently unaffected by the disgust with which he was surveying her. 

‘And this is the thing that killed eighteen men?’

‘And some slave children.’

Crucis didn’t even bother waving those deaths away. ‘You saw it do this?’

‘I - just one man and the children -’ Vullen took a deep breath and tried to force his wavering tones to steady. ‘As I said, she killed the man in front of my eyes, to prove her abilities to me. Then the other children, three or four, in one stroke.’

‘Stroke? You said it did not touch them.’

Vullen became aware that his mouth was hanging open as he groped for words. He closed it and swallowed. ‘She touched them through the Force, my lord. I could only sense a hint of what she did, but it seems - from the manner of their deaths, and the evidence provided by the medical examiner you sent to examine the corpses some weeks ago - that she blocked the blood flow to the autonomic regions of the brain. It kills instantly.’

‘And the others?’

‘My lord?’

‘The men who killed each other.’ Crucis consulted the datapad lying in front of him on the desk; for show, Vullen was certain. ‘Three of them. You claim this - this Miralukan was also responsible for that?’

‘I didn’t -’ Despite the coolness of the office’s controlled environment and recycled air, the sweat broke out on Vullen’s skin again. ‘She claimed responsibility, my lord. She said she had compelled the men to strike at their fellows.’

‘You saw evidence of this?’

‘She said she couldn’t - not while the men were aware, and on their guard.’ Vullen swallowed; this was all going wrong. ‘Persuasion does work better on the unwary -’

‘Really? Having just this moment been deposited on Korriban as an acolyte, I had no idea.’ Crucis leaned back in his chair and folded his hands, his eyes never leaving the child. ‘Persuasion does not work as you have described, Vullen, as you would know if you had any real grasp of the Dark Side. A Sith can certainly overwhelm the will of another, even an untrained one, if they have sufficient power. But that is to obey a simple command, or amplify a hidden impulse, and in most cases, it lasts only a minute or so. You are describing a suggestion sufficiently strong to compel one man to kill another, yet specific enough to leave the psyche otherwise intact, and all implanted without the subject being aware of it.’ Crucis shook his head. ‘There are Darths who could not do it. If this - this thing you had brought me had any real power, no matter how raw, I would feel it. Yet you ask me to believe she has mastered something that Force-users of terrible potency would not attempt?’

‘But - she told me -’

‘And you never considered that perhaps it was lying to escape its servitude in the mines?’

The sweat prickled on the back of Vullen’s neck; he brushed it away. The rising panic in his body lent him an urgency which goosed his tongue into gear. ‘My lord, an insect is a thing which may be crushed by a strong breeze, but it can still kill a man - even the mightiest - by injecting its poison into his blood. And this child comes from a species in which even those who cannot feel or control the Force use it to see without eyes, navigate their environment to the finest degree despite living in perpetual darkness. Is it so difficult to believe that a highly-developed example of that species could see inside another living being, ignoring barriers of skin or flesh - taking in the pathways of blood, oxygen, even electrical impulses of thought and compulsion at a glance, just as we might study a star chart? 

‘How much strength does it take to pinch an artery closed, or twitch neurons to form new, unexplored pathways? Certainly less than it takes to crush a throat, but is it not just as lethal? Does it matter if she whispers rather than screams in the Force, if she proves as able to strike down her enemies? I agree that she lacks strength, but, my lord Crucis, she still has _power._ ’

‘We gain power through strength,’ Crucis corrected. ‘Nevertheless …’ He stared at the child, his pointed fingernails beating a thoughtful tattoo on the surface of the desk. ‘If you are correct, this alien is an abomination. But one which could have its uses, and rebound to my credit. Yes. If you are correct.’ He lifted his eyes to Vullen’s face, and smiled coldly. ‘All things are theoretically possible, I suppose.’

Vullen flushed, and dropped his own eyes.

Crucis shifted in his chair, turning to face the child across the desk. ‘Look at me,’ he ordered.

The child lifted her blindfolded face as if she was indeed looking at him.

‘Did you kill my miners, alien?’

Vullen saw the child open her mouth and sensed her framing the question. ‘This is Lord Crucis, child,’ he said hurriedly. ‘A very important and powerful Dark Lord of the Sith. He will decide your fate, so answer truthfully.’

‘My faithful Vullen,’ Crucis acknowledged, almost lazily. ‘I ask again, alien: Did you kill my miners?’

‘Yes.’ Away from the mines, with its air freighted by choking dust, the child’s voice sounded, well, inhuman, it was so rasping. ‘Will you take me to Korriban?’

Crucis ignored that. ‘Did you use your powers to command three men to kill three others? And to cut off the flow of blood to the brains of fifteen other men, killing them instantly?’

‘Yes. Will you take me to Korriban?’

‘Who taught you to do this, alien?’

The child was silent.

‘Answer my question,’ Crucis said ominously.

‘I don’t think she understands,’ Vullen said hastily. He turned to the child. ‘Did anybody teach you to do the things you do? To … look inside people, and touch them?’

The child shook her head. 

‘How did you learn to do it?’

The child took a long time to answer. Then she said: ‘I practiced. In the dark.’

‘What about the people on the ship with you? Before you came to the mines?’ Vullen asked, eager to forestall Crucis’s next question and an interrogation he could only see building to a horrific climax. ‘Were any of them - could any of them do the things you do? Could they say things, and have other people obey them? Or move things without touching them?’

The child did not answer.

‘You must remember, child,’ Vullen urged her. ‘Try to remember.’

She lifted one shoulder in a sort of shrug, and slumped down further into her chair.

‘This thing already understands the Sith better than you do, Vullen,’ Crucis remarked. ‘She knows her past among her people must be obliterated if she is to become something more glorious.’

‘I was -’ Vullen began, but Crucis cut across him. 

‘You have convinced Vullen, but you will learn, if ever you do become Sith, that even we have our failures and our weaklings. I am not one of them.’ Crucis rose from his chair, crimson robes settling elegantly around his lithe form as he looked down at the child. ‘If you wish to leave this office alive, you must convince me that you have some power burning within you, that you can do more than whisper in the shadows and trick the gullible. Otherwise you will not survive your first night on Korriban, and I will have wasted the resources it would take to spend you there.’

She stirred. ‘I want to go to Korriban.’

‘Then show me you belong there.’ Crucis turned his head to look at the wall; the child followed his gaze. 

On its own slender plinth of Kaasian granite stood a hollow bust of a Sith lord - Crucis’ ancestor Lord Khaslan, Vullen knew. It appeared to be glass, but Vullen knew it had been carved from aldebaranite, a rare crystal shot through with branching spurts of blood-red mineral. And a heavy one.

Crucis raised his hand, palm outwards, then languidly rotated his wrist, fingers curling inwards except for one which beckoned elegantly. 

Vullen felt the surge of Crucis’s power as the bust rose smoothly from its perch, gliding forwards through the air as if summoned by that crooked finger. It performed a stately twirl on the spot, then glided back to the plinth, settling itself in place once more.

‘The lowliest acolyte fresh off the shuttle to Korriban could lift that statue.’ Vullen opened his mouth, but a lifted finger from Crucis silenced him. ‘Show me what you can do.’

Awkwardly, the ragged child slid off the chair. She planted her feet as they sank into the deep carpet, and Vullen heard the rasping, tearing sound of her lungs as she took a deep breath. She stretched out one hand towards the plinth, her grime-blackened fingers bony and bloody at the ends. 

It was not like it had been down in the cavern, when Vullen had needed to stretch every sense to catch the whispers of her impact on the Force. This time he felt her pushing outwards, the unnaturalness of it, the terrible strain with which he himself was so familiar. Even in the Dark Side there was give and take, currents of attraction and repulsion weaving an invisible veil she was trying to force herself through by sheer will. It would not work. She needed training.

The bust stood motionless on its plinth, the ancient Sith Lord’s carved face smiling inscrutably.

He could hear the tearing inside her small chest as she tried to gulp in oxygen through airways clotted with dust and old blood; sweat was standing out on her forehead above the ragged blindfold, her yellow teeth were gritted. Vullen felt a terrible temptation to try to help her, to reach out himself and attempt to slip a bit of his own power into her effort, but he had never been able to hide anything from Crucis …

A wet, choking sound came from deep inside her throat, and the bust rocked forward on its plinth, the Sith Lord bowing. Her fingers contorted as if trying to snatch it off its perch, but closed on empty air; the bust settled back into place on the plinth, and the child slumped forward, gasping.

Crucis let the silence stretch out before he said, ‘So now we know.’ He seated himself once again in his chair, folded his hands before him on the desk. ‘Whatever alien tricks you have practiced in your hole, the simplest of the Sith arts eludes you. Nevertheless, the Empire’s need is great, and all who can must serve.’ He reached for a datapad. ‘I will arrange for your passage to the Sith sanctum on Agoso. There you will join other novices who -’

Her head had been hanging down as she fought for breath, but it whipped up. ‘I want to go to Korriban.’

Crucis continued as if she had not spoken, although Vullen could see the tightening of his jaw. ‘You will join other novices who have shown some sign of -’

She reached out and gripped the edge of his desk. ‘I want to go to Korriban!’

Crucis stared for a moment at the filthy, talon-like fingers. Then he drew a breath, and put the datapad down. ‘Korriban is for those on the brink of becoming Sith. You will go to the sanctum on Agoso.’

‘Once you have trained a bit more, you will be sent to Korriban to face the trials,’ Vullen began placatingly, but the girl ignored him, her blind glare fixed on Crucis.

‘I want to go to Korriban now!’

Crucis rose in one fluid movement, his chair slamming backwards into the wall; he ignored it as completely as they had both disregarded Vullen’s attempt to interrupt. His eyes were riveted on the child’s blindfold; Vullen almost saw the air between them shimmer as if with unbearable heat. ‘You are nothing,’ he said calmly, almost conversationally, but Vullen heard the savage snarl snaking through the words, ‘you are alien filth, your wants could not be of less consequence. You will understand that, here and now, or you will not live to see Agoso.’

Even disregarded in his chair, nothing more than a forgotten witness, Vullen had to fight not to visibly shrink from Crucis’ waxing presence, but the child leaned forward; he did not know if she had understood a word the Sith Lord had said, if she was capable of understanding the magnitude of the will she was trying to pit herself against. ‘Korriban!’

‘ _No._ ’

It was only now that Vullen really became aware of the child as alive. She had seemed so dry, so insubstantial in the darkness and the stench of the mines; a thing of shreds and patches, a whisper away from shrivelling up in the heat and disintegrating into ashes. Even her efforts to move the statue had seemed like the blind strivings of a larva or a grub, a wordless, inhuman writhing that was almost indecent to behold. 

But now for the first time he sensed her rage, felt her as a wild thing battering against the bars of a cage; animal, inhuman, but real and alive in her balked fury. He almost felt her heart pounding in his own chest as he watched her turn her head from side to side, incandescent with frustration at her denial. He saw her gaze fall on one of Crucis’s most precious pieces; a Sâtzu bowl from before the time of the Great Hyperspace War, the colour of dried blood, a thing three millennia old which stood alone on its own shelf, supreme in its lustre.

She flung out a hand.

He was so transfixed that he realised too late what she was doing. 

‘Korriban!’ she spat, and with a vicious gesture she snatched the bowl from its shelf and sent it flying across the room.

Vullen’s cry of warning died in his throat as the precious bowl, light as a leaf compared to the statue she had tried vainly to budge before, shattered against the side of Crucis’ desk. 

The silence that followed was thick and cloying. 

Slowly, moving with great deliberation, Crucis bent and picked up a large jagged shard of the bowl, turning it over and over in his fingers. 

Vullen desperately wanted to speak, but his tongue felt as if it was glued to the roof of his mouth.

‘What you just destroyed was a relic more precious than you can begin to imagine,’ Crucis said, as he ran his fingers over the piece of porcelain. ‘A thing that was already old and beautiful when the Sith themselves were still young. Like all your kind, you only know how to lash out and destroy the glory which eludes you.’

‘Crucis.’ It was little more than a whisper. ‘My lord, please - she didn’t know -’

‘You hoped to prove your power to me,’ Crucis went on, once again speaking over Vullen as if he had not heard him. ‘Instead you proved that no matter how powerful you might become, you will never be truly Sith. You will never have any more of us than the most puling, Force-blind aberration is born possessing. You - does it have a name?’

The abrupt question caught Vullen off guard. ‘No, my lord - that is - I don’t know -’

‘What did you say the miners called this thing and its ilk? Gnats?’ He smiled entirely without humour. ‘Tiny buzzing creatures bred from decay, fed on lifeblood. Yes.’

Vullen could feel the tension of the child beside him, a dreadful stillness.

‘On Dromund Kaas we call them nath flies. _Nath _, hungry or empty - a void craving to be filled, as their appetite for blood is never sated. You will be called An’nath. _An _, less or lower than. Less than a fly. You will go to Agoso, and you will learn, and you will obey.’ At last, he raised his eyes from the porcelain shard in his hand. ‘But first … you will be marked.’____

____The child sprang, an instinctive dive towards the side of the desk as if she could shelter in its shadow, or perhaps to snatch for her own weapon among the shards of broken porcelain. But even as she sprang, something struck her, sending her staggering in a half-circle. As Vullen stumbled to his feet, tripping on his robes, he saw the child slammed on her back against the desk as if swatted out of the air, one sticklike arm pinned by the side of her head._ _ _ _

____She twisted to grab at the invisible restraint, but her free hand smacked down to the desk and stayed there as if glued._ _ _ _

____‘My lord -’ he began in a strangled whisper._ _ _ _

____As the pinned child kicked and writhed, fighting desperately to free herself, Crucis tested the edge of the shard of porcelain against his thumb. A drop of blood emerged from his crimson skin, dark and swollen like a plum. He caught Vullen’s horrified eye as Vullen backed away from the child’s flailing feet, and smiled. ‘Sâtzu pottery,’ he said almost dreamily. ‘The secret has been lost, you know.’_ _ _ _

____‘My lord - Darth Crucis -’_ _ _ _

____Crucis looked down into the blind, livid face upturned to his. ‘Since the first blissful mingling of our ancient ancestors with the Dark Jedi,’ he said, as casually as if making polite conversation, ‘there have been those, born with the purest Sith blood in their veins, who are nevertheless estranged completely from the Force. Creatures of the Dark Side who cannot use or even sense its power. It has been argued that these abominations should be exposed as soon as their deformity is revealed, and left to die. But even something that seems to have no right to exist may serve a purpose in the end, and we have never been so numerous as to be free from the fear of extinction.’_ _ _ _

____The child was still struggling, filthy fingers clawing impotently at the air._ _ _ _

____‘Since ancient times,’ Crucis went on, ‘it has been customary to mark these aberrations. The same mark throughout the centuries. Here and here.’ With his fingernail, he drew two vertical lines on his own face, each beginning just below the outer edge of his nostrils and slashing down across his lips. ‘So every time one of them spoke to a true Sith, the one to whom they spoke would be reminded that their words came from the lips of one little better than an animal. Little better than a slave. The blind shame of a resplendent race.’_ _ _ _

____Crucis lifted the porcelain shard again, bringing it before the upside-down face of the child. ‘You may yet reach Korriban, little gnat. You may live to face the trials and even to become a Sith. But I will not allow anyone - least of all you - to forget what you are: An abomination. A thing that serves a purpose, but has no right to exist. Vullen, hold her head.’_ _ _ _

____Vullen could only shake his own head, feebly, staring down in horror at the child trapped on the desk._ _ _ _

____Crucis sighed mildly and addressed the child once more. ‘Now you see what pardoning weakness can lead to. Can you feel his shame? He quivers with it. Writhes with it. Truthfully, I believe he enjoys it.’ Crucis cocked a browstalk towards Vullen. ‘Although perhaps not today.’_ _ _ _

____Vullen felt the tingle on the back of his neck, the spider-silk strand brushing. Crucis absently lifted his hand to his own neck, then stopped short, laughing suddenly. ‘You will have to do better than that, my fly. Vullen, _come._ ’_ _ _ _

____Slowly, Vullen took the child’s face between his shaking hands. His sweat-slicked palms slipped as she tried to jerk her head out of his grasp, and her blindfold slipped, almost coming free. It was that which gave him the strength to clamp his hands down on her head; despite everything, he still could not bear the thought of seeing what lay beneath the ragged blindfold - vestigial eyes, filmed over with translucent skin? No eyes at all?_ _ _ _

____The child’s pulse was hammering against the fingertips that pressed against her throat. Vullen squeezed his eyes shut to block out the sight of her white, upside-down face. _Beg,_ he thought madly, _beg for mercy._ But Crucis had been right to say the child already understood the Sith too well for that._ _ _ _

____Through the sound of his own blood roaring through his ears, Vullen still heard Crucis cut. And cut._ _ _ _

____It was over. Vullen reeled away from the desk, swallowing hard over and over and wiping his palms convulsively on his robes._ _ _ _

____Crucis looked down at the shard of porcelain in his hand, now stained along one edge, then tossed it negligently aside. He sat down in his high-backed chair and reached for a concealed button underneath its edge._ _ _ _

____The doors to his office hissed open, and two of Crucis’s personal guard were saluting respectfully in the doorway. ‘My lord?’_ _ _ _

____‘Take this -’ a flick of his hand indicated the child, a crumpled heap - ‘to the infirmary and have her wounds treated. Watch her carefully. There must be at least two of you in the room with her at all times.’_ _ _ _

____The child sat up slowly, one hand clasped across her mouth and chin. Awkwardly, one-handed, she pushed herself off the desk, leaving, Vullen saw with revulsion, a wet smear on its polished surface. Her knees almost buckled when her feet touched the carpet, but she staggered and stayed upright, walking shakily across the office towards the guards, one of whom had extended a hand to beckon to her._ _ _ _

____‘Tell the medtechs not to treat the cuts too carefully,’ Crucis added. ‘The marks of this lesson must endure, after all.’_ _ _ _

____The child stopped, and looked back; not at Crucis, but at Vullen. He sagged against the wall, cringing, too weak to even lower his eyes._ _ _ _

____After a long moment, she turned her head away from him and stepped forward again to the guards, one of whom gingerly grasped her upper arm. She hung passively from his grip, allowing him to steer her towards the doorway._ _ _ _

____Through the entire ordeal, Vullen realised suddenly, he had not heard her utter one sound._ _ _ _

____‘And send someone to clear this mess up,’ Crucis ordered._ _ _ _

____The office doors hissed closed behind the departing guards._ _ _ _

____As if the child being cut off from his sight was the final relief, Vullen felt his own knees buckle; he caught himself on the wall, but his sweaty palms slipped against it._ _ _ _

____‘Interesting specimen,’ Crucis mused, his fingertips once again beating their pensive rhythm on the desk. ‘We shall have to remember to keep an eye on her training. With some rudimentary skills acquired, she could indeed be a candidate for Korriban. This might rebound to our credit yet. _Do_ come away from the wall, Vullen.’_ _ _ _

____Vullen pushed himself unsteadily away from the wall to stand, swaying and unsupported._ _ _ _

____‘I will arrange passage to Agoso immediately,’ Crucis continued, reaching for his datapad once again; Vullen imagined functionaries and bureaucrats throughout the station springing into action, brought to life by their lord’s command. ‘You will accompany her, of course, and stay until you are satisfied that the masters have an appropriate understanding of what they are dealing with. Ceridu can certainly spare you.’_ _ _ _

_____Yes, Darth Crucis._ Vullen could not make his mouth form the words._ _ _ _

____‘She will need to be watched most carefully on the journey,’ Crucis instructed. ‘Now that she has been shown her place, she might attempt to use her tricks. Do not allow her to give you the slip.’ He smiled coldly. ‘Not until I have had sufficient recompense for what the little beast cost me today.’_ _ _ _

____Vullen nodded, dumbly._ _ _ _

____‘What is the matter with you, Vullen?’ Crucis leant back in his chair, studying the other man with mild exasperation. ‘I am not displeased with you, if that’s what you fear. You were correct to bring her to me. If she fulfils her potential, I will recoup much prestige from unearthing a powerful Force-user in the Empire’s time of need. And you have never needed reminding that whatever adds to my glory must strengthen your position, too.’_ _ _ _

____Vullen did not move. He rather thought that if he did, he might crumble to the floor to lie in pieces on Darth Crucis’s carpet, mingling with the wreckage._ _ _ _

____‘Not that, then.’ Crucis sighed, and got up from his chair. He crossed the floor, shards of broken porcelain crunching beneath his feet, to where Vullen stood. Vullen felt the slightest bite of fingernails as Crucis took his chin in one hand, turning it so that he was looking into the Sith Lord’s face. ‘Speak, Vullen. Tell me what it is.’_ _ _ _

____‘You didn’t have to do it,’ Vullen blurted out. To his everlasting shame, he felt sudden, hot tears starting to his eyes._ _ _ _

____‘Do what?’_ _ _ _

____‘You didn’t have to -’ He gestured dumbly at the desk, still with its telltale smear. ‘You - she - she didn’t understand about Agoso. We could have explained to her. She _wanted_ to be Sith.’ The waste of it all overwhelmed him, the futility, the wantonness; Crucis could have held her head still himself, but he had ordered Vullen to do it. ‘She didn’t have to go away hating us, Torslan.’ He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, a futile gesture; he knew his tears had reached Crucis’s fingers. ‘She could have - she could have _loved_ us.’_ _ _ _

____‘Do you truly think a thing like that is capable of love?’ Crucis asked, almost gently. ‘Better for her, where she’s going, if she is not.’ He smiled, his thumb sliding over Vullen’s wet cheek. ‘After all, it never did you much good, did it, Vullen?’_ _ _ _

____‘No, my lord,’ he answered hoarsely. ‘It didn’t.’_ _ _ _

____He might not have been able to stop himself from leaning into the touch, had not Crucis taken his hand away. ‘Then I have been merciful, after all, have I not?’_ _ _ _

____Crucis did not wait to hear Vullen’s answer, turning away in a swirl of robes to return to his desk. Vullen saw the fastidious flick of crimson fingers, saw shining droplets scatter and fall to land on the carpet amidst the shattered porcelain._ _ _ _

____He made an attempt to straighten himself, smoothing down his robes with trembling hands; there were eyes waiting in the outer office, someone would be coming in soon to clear up the mess, a shuttle was waiting. ‘Yes, Lord Crucis.’ He blotted his cheeks with his sleeve before more tears could fall on the carpet. ‘Thank you, Lord Crucis.’_ _ _ _

**Author's Note:**

> Pure backstory for my Sith Inquisitor OC An'nath, who was strongly inspired by the character of Allie/Mother Eve in _The Power_. 
> 
> Planet names come from the Star Wars Name Generator. The Star Wars universe belongs to George Lucas and Disney.
> 
> I made up the Sith words which Darth Crucis uses. I also made up Darth Crucis and Vullen. 
> 
> How _does_ Miralukan vision work?


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